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The thing about print adverts was that they stayed where they were. Photo by Bethan on Flickr.

TL:DR: when Apple’s iOS 9 comes out in September, there’s going to be a dramatic uptake of ad blockers on iOS – and it’s going to have far-reaching effects not just on websites and advertisers, but potentially also on the balance in mobile platforms and even on Google’s revenues.

Now, the longer version.

Remember newspapers?

In the old days, adverts appeared in print, on the radio and on the TV. Most ad-supported news organisations that have shifted to the internet began in print.

Ads in print were straightforward. Advertisers bought space, and editors could turn them down, or sometimes decide not to run them if a story broke that would bring about an awkward juxtaposition of, say, the advert for a shoe store on page 3 and the big breaking story now being placed on page 3 about people having feet crushed by a runaway steamroller. (The ad would get moved to another page.) Print ads were hard for advertisers to track, though they could use codes and so on that would clue them in to where someone had seen one if they responded directly.

Then came the internet, and the promise of measuring which adverts people had seen, and which they had clicked, followed swiftly by the realisation that you’d be able to follow what adverts people had seen between different sites by use of tracking cookies and scripts.

That’s where we’re at: websites are getting overloaded with ads, beacons, trackers and scripts that are all scrambling over each other in their attempt to squeeze the last bit of information about us from every page.

But nobody asked us, the readers, along the way whether that was OK. And now, people are deciding that it’s not OK.

Block that ad!

The uptake of AdBlock and its commercial sibling Adblock Plus has been gradual, but has now reached more than 150m users, and it’s accelerating. People are getting pissed off with the huge data loads pages impose without their consent, and the idea that they’re being tracked without their consent. In this post-Snowden age, the latter particularly bugs people. Fine, I came to your site; record the fact. But you’re watching me wherever I go online? That’s not acceptable.

People are also pissed off about what can happen when they view an advert online. In all the years I’ve viewed print adverts, I’ve never had one that:
• filled the page I was trying to read and insisted I either wait or click on a particular point on the page to read the article I came for;
• moved up from off the page to insert itself in front of the article I was reading and ask me to sign up for a mailing list;
• started automatically playing a video advert while I was reading some text;
• infected my computer with malware inserted in the ad;
• ran a Javascript script that pretended I need to pay a ransom, or otherwise blocked any interaction unless I pressed a button saying “OK”;
• turned me away from the page I was reading to a completely different one demanding I download an unrelated app.

You may well have other examples. (I’ve not had the malware/Javascript experience online, but other people certainly have.)

Apple: bite me

Into this comes Apple, which guards the user experience on the iOS platform, its biggest moneymaker, very jealously. Apple’s executives and staff aren’t blind to the things that are going on; they use their phones, and they get the same experiences. User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it. Hence content blockers for Safari (and all web views) on iOS 9, which wasn’t announced onstage at WWDC but was one of those “Whoa!” moments on browsing through the Settings in the first iOS 9 beta. (Do read the link in the previous sentence, which explains what iOS 9 content blockers are, and are not.) Hence also Apple News, which is basically “all those sites but with the crap taken out”.

The ad intrusion situation on mobile is arguably worse than on desktop, since people are more sensitive about the amount of data they download on mobile, and their phones are less powerful so that complex layouts take longer.

You can get some adblockers for Android (though reviews for the main one are mixed), though you can’t get AdBlock Plus. You can get Ghostery (which shows you what you’re being tracked by) for Android. But there’s nothing like either presently for iOS.

That’s going to change, and I think the advent of iOS 9 and content blocking extensions will touch off a firestorm.

Update: just to clarify: content blocking extensions aren’t built in to iOS 9; only the capability to use them. But people are already working on them. You’ll have to download them and install them, rather like third-party keyboards.

Here’s a video of one presently being developed by Chris Aljoidi:/Update

These blocking extensions will be paid for (at least initially), but the effect of people tweeting and updating Facebook about how much they enjoy the ad-free web will be hard to ignore. As Carl Howe observes, “Like it or not, once Apple supports ad-blocking in its browsers, it will become the default for people who don’t want tracking.” That also plays into Apple’s other general message, about how it doesn’t track what you do when you’re using its products.

Once this begins happening on mobile, it’s going to sweep back on to the desktop. “How do I do this on my PC?” will become quite a common question. People will load up with adblockers. That’s when websites will begin to face a real problem.

The moral conundrum

Of course, at this point we should step back and ask “why were the adverts there in the first place?” Oh yes, because they help pay for the content. In some – well, many, almost all – cases, they pay for all of the content. As Rene Ritchie of iMore explains, these days sites have to rely on getting ad inventory from all over to fill space; multiple networks vie to fill the space with the most apposite ad for the lowest price (to the advertiser) that the publisher will accept.

It’s worth considering what Ritchie wrote at length:

While we sell premium ads directly to advertisers, that only fills a small subset of the required “inventory” to support the network. Some 85% of ads we served last month were “programmatic”—provided by ad exchanges like Google Adx and Appnexus. Those exchanges are pretty much black boxes. We get a tag, we insert it, and ads appear.

Each ad gets its own iframe, so load is asynchronous and, if one fails, it doesn’t kill the entire site. Unfortunately, that also means each one fires its own trackers, even if those trackers are identical across ads. It’s terribly inefficient.

We’ve tried to find or figure out a way to streamline them, but haven’t been able to. They’re built into the foundations of all the major networks, ad and social, ostensibly to provide more “relevant” content.

When we do get good ads, as soon as they finish their allotted impressions, they go away, and the ad spot gets back-filled with “remnants” which get progressively worse and worse the more we refresh the site.

We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.

So ads are out of control even for sites. That’s so removed from the world of print, where an editor could veto or move an ad, that it’s boggling.

It’s this lack of control – the mad desire and demand by advertisers to get everything, indifferent to the effect of the user experience on the reader – that is driving people to adblockers. It’s a variant of the tragedy of the commons.

People don’t like it; here’s what a recent survey for Reuters shows. (What it doesn’t show is how many of those who don’t block ads know of the capability for doing it.)

Not very legible; adblocking is the lower bars. People aren’t happy.

But wait, what about the moral dimension? The fact that if you block the ads, the sites lose their income?

I’ve previously written that the two sides on this are far apart; that adblocking is the new speeding: those who do it can justify why to themselves, while those who think it’s wrong are stern in their disapproval.

Entertainingly, when I noted on Twitter how many trackers I’d blocked using Ghostery (as part of an experiment using Ghostery, AdBlock, Javascript Blocker and uBlock to see how it changed my browsing experience), I was at once the object of finger-wagging and the accusation of the destruction of journalism:

@GeorgeBouras@charlesarthur And perhaps be done with quality media and journalism while you're at it. Have you no responsibility to them?

Have I any responsibility to them? Well, not really. Certainly as a standard reader, here’s what happened: I accepted an invitation to read an article, but I don’t think that we quite got things straight at the top of the page over the extent to which I’d be tracked, and how multiple ad networks would profile me, and suck up my data allowance, and interfere with the reading experience. Don’t I get any say in the last two, at least?

Print evolved. Now it’s the web advertisers’ turn

This is the part of the debate that so interests (and, frankly, entertains) me. Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at: advertising was moving, and if they didn’t move too, they’d just die.

Now we’re all online, but somehow we’re meant to accept that web advertising is how it is, and never question or deviate from it? Nuh-uh. Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? What’s sauce for the print goose is sauce for the online gander. I don’t recall the people who scolded me for using tracking detectors previously saying that everyone had to stick with print adverts because they made more money (which those ads still do).

Furthermore, any argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.

Which quickly leads to…

If any significant number of users shift to using adblockers, web advertisers are going to have to move quickly to deal with that new reality. Web publishers too.

(Though I have to say I have very little sympathy for a lot of web “publishers”. Back in the early days of the web, the Guardian ran a brilliant ad which asked “Ever wondered how every day there’s just enough news to fit in the newspaper?” It was advertising the Guardian website, and the fact there was more there than you’d find in the paper.

Now? There are a gazillion websites – but tons of them are simple copies, monetised by adverts from Google or whoever, which leach from the originating sites by copying their content. We’ve now established the limits of how much news is generated each day: it’s more than fits in newspapers, but less than fits on all the websites currently dedicated to “news”. If adblocking puts some of the copiers on the skids, I won’t weep. That’s not journalism; it’s a sort of horrible stenography, even worse than some of the stenography that does pass for journalism at some bigger sites. Good journalism, and worthwhile sites, will survive. Or good journalists will.)

What form will the evolution take? Well, look at sites like Buzzfeed, and their use of native content. If the site generates the ad, it’s suddenly a lot harder to block. We’re back, in a way, in the land of print, where the printing of the editorial and the ads happened in the same place.

Ecosystem fights

Beyond all this, there’s a longer-term potential effect. I don’t think Apple was gleefully thinking of ways to nobble Google when it decided to introduce content blocking, but this could have quite an effect.

Consider: iOS 9 arrives, and lots of happy iOS users say how delighted they are to be blocking those annoying ads. (Don’t underestimate how quickly iOS 9 will be taken up: it’s going to be available for devices going back to the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and will use less storage than iOS 8. Even iOS 8 was on half of iOS devices within two months of release.) Meanwhile Android users won’t be able to follow suit (to anything like the same extent). At least one of two things will happen:
• some Android users begin considering switching to iPhones
• Google comes under pressure to allow adblockers on the Play Store to prevent Android switching.

Neither of these is good for Google. The loss of Android users is probably more tolerable in the short term. Adblocking could pose an existential risk to Google (which is why it pays Adblock Plus’s makers to not block Google ads).

It’s unlikely that adblocking could ever reach a pitch where it really offers a grave threat to Google. But as more and more people from developing countries come online, paying for every kilobyte of data, they might want adblocking too. India in particular is a generally tech-savvy country where data prices are high; and it has embraced Android enthusiastically. Consider for a moment how that could play out.

Relevantly, Global Web Index has a survey of adblocking use which found that 27% of users aged 16-64 globally in its 33-country survey had used an adblocker, and 15% had blocked tracking.

Adblocking by region. Source: GlobalWebIndex.

Statista also had detail about European use:

Adblocking has relatively low use – but what happens when it arrives on mobile?

Consider: hardly any of that is mobile yet. Mobile is the biggest platform. Adblocking is coming to a key mobile platform in September.

I’ve used ad blockers on Firefox for years now; sadly not on my phone as it’s too old and slow to consider but I wonder if Google will have it on the basic Android web browser now that Apple has taken the lead.

My opinion of those who object to ad blocking software because it ruins site revenues is that: a. I’m not going to buy the advertiser’s products anyway so there s no difference; b. sorry, that’s just how the free market works. If your revenue stream isn’t working for you you might want to find some other way of monetizing your site, and markets will ultimately adapt to the new reality. You chose to offer stuff free at the point of use; if you choose to withdraw that that’s no skin off my nose. If I can’t read content (say from The Times [of London]) because it’s behind a paywall, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

Great read and lots of comments too. I think this is where branding will become far more important than ever before. If you brand yourself and advertise yourself, your services than its not intrusive. People come to you because they want what you have to offer. Ad blocking will definitely make advertisers get laser targeted in their approach. Anxious to see how it all develops.

I don’t have a smartphone, so I don’t have to deal with some of the issues you describe. But I get so ticked off at ads that pop up and get in the way of what I’m trying to read on a website…. I understand the need for websites to earn money (information may want to be free, but bandwidth costs money!), so I can handle some ads. Banners or static images that sit on the margins, “click-through” ads (the ones where you watch a few seconds of an ad before you can get to the web page you want), those I can handle. It’s the ones that actively interfere with my using your site or reading your article. Keep it up, and I’ll go somewhere else…

This is really interesting. I use an ad blocker on my desktop to cut down on loading time. I’m building website right now and I’m thinking about using ads, but I want to place them all on a separate page with products and services that I use and not something random. Readers have the choice of going to the ad page and won’t have to worry about load time.

Good article, but one of its main points has already been undermined; Adblock is back in the Google Play store. Although it doesn’t block all ad’s, pretty much all the autoplay, all of the click thru, and a everything with Flash is gone. Currently, Android users can bock more ads than iPhone users can. Google has already made a preemptive strike against Apple , and seems to have a plan to deal with ad bloat on its own.

“AdBlock is back in the Google Play Store”. No, it isn’t. A search for “AdBlock Plus” on Google Play yields a number of app results, but none is Adblock Plus. A search for “Adblock” yields the same results, where the ad blockers listed work by DNS resolution (or changing your DNS settings). I’d be wary of those: varying your DNS settings can lead you open to MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks. None of these “ad blockers” on Google Play is highly ranked. And none offers the usefulness of the (three so far) content blockers I’ve been testing on iOS 9.

You can *sideload* AdBlock Plus for Android; it’s unclear how many have. As for this being a “preemptive strike against Apple”, the adblocking war is asymmetrical: Apple is fine if all ads are blocked, but Google has a problem. Quite what you think “Google’s plan to deal with ad bloat” is, you haven’t said. But it isn’t allowing reliable, simple, trustworthy, effective adblockers on its app store so far.

“In this post-Snowden age, the latter particularly bugs people.” – if you go back to the real world you’ll notice maybe 10-20% of ‘people’ know who Snowden is.

“but the effect of people tweeting and updating Facebook about how much they enjoy the ad-free web will be hard to ignore.” – so the same smart ‘people’ don’t know Facebook tracks all of their online movements (including eye movement)?

Because of the faulty examples above, this article misses the point. People are either smart or dumb – they cannot be dumb only to prove one of your points and smart to prove another point.

Re Snowden – if those 10-20% of people know about it, then they’ll install adblockers where they can. They’ll make noise about it. (I’m seeing a lot of noise over the topic, though of course I’ve got a particular interest.) Howard Stern, the radio DJ, discovered all about it live on air. This is getting beyond the technology shores.

Re Facebook, people might know they’re tracked, but accept it as the price of use because Facebook offers them so much utility. I think it’s a false dichotomy to split people into “smart” and “dumb”; people hold a lot of ideas about things in their heads, and prioritise as they like. They aren’t even necessarily consistent about it (which can drive some geeks mad). If they can get faster web pages and less data use by installing a little app which – its advocates say – will also mean they aren’t being tracked in some unasked way, I suspect they’ll take it. Facebook’s tracking doesn’t enter into it.

You also say “this article misses the point”. You haven’t said what the point therefore is if this article has missed it. Unless it’s your assertion that people are either smart or dumb, which I don’t agree with.

Are you sure Google doesn’t worry about it? Larry Page certainly knows about it. Google has explained how iOS 9 apps can violate HTTPS security in order to serve ads. (Link elsewhere on this blog.) I’d bet this is being discussed actively.

I see it differently. I am not against advertisements–in fact, I want to see advertisements, as long as they are relevant to me. I want to know what is on sale in my community or online, on the newest items coming out and so on, so long as they are relevant to my needs, but 99.99% of the ads I see on the web and on mobile are not relevant to me at all.

One of the purposes of all of us giving up our privacy, and allowing the Googles (Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.) to analyze our emails and browsing histories, was so that those companies would know us individually so well, that we would get decent, relevant advertisements.

Obviously, it doesn’t work, as people turn more and more to ad blockers out of simple self-defense. I would certainly think if “relevance” would work anywhere, it would be in advertising, which is life and death for companies.

But it doesn’t work–and nobody can say that it does. At least not with a straight face.

What does this mean for our reliance on “relevance” and all of those secret algorithms that are supposed to know us so well that they can help us in zillions of ways we just cannot understand?

I think it’s a load of BS. Those great organizations can’t do the tiniest percent of what they claim. And this proves it.

Give me relevant advertisements–I want them. Then, I might believe that relevance does what it says, but give me what I see now and I am more than a little skeptical.

Hi Arthur. What you are referring to here in this article is Malvertising. But malware is not the fault of advertisers, per see, Unless you think that an advertiser is purposely using hackers to fuck around with their potential customer’s devices/life. Hackers are responsible for malicious code to do invasive things. I highly doubt that a responsible advertiser would want to destroy the trust of a prospective customer. It’s the spammer/scammer types that do this to exploit the public. Not real advertisers. But I agree with your previous comment about the inane repetitions of ad to people that do not want to buy their products. I not only recommend a ad universal opt-out program, I am actually building one with my software company. So as you suggested, and unlike the majority of commenters around the world, I *am* actually doing something about it.